THE PROJECT STATUS App
Many projects fail in the sense of the definition that they are delivered late, over budget or with a lesser scope and quality then planned or promised.
Projects are typically complex, technically or organisationally, and involve a lot of stakeholders that may politically or with their power influence the project.
Managing this complexity needs instruments. The amount of textbooks and articles on project management is vast. In contrast, the amount of textbooks and articles on project control is tiny. At best this discipline is covered in maximum one chapter of the project management books. Project control seems to be the forgotten discipline.
Agile Transparency is Good But Not Enough
As a further result no gold standard has developed for good project status reporting that helps the project manager and the persons involved in the project to keep the overview of the project. Even among the most prominent project software tools, the approach to project control is widely different. Some tools do not offer regular project status reporting at all, others leave the user alone to construct some project reporting and again others offer status reports that are difficult to understand or read.
Some remedy for the lack of transparency has been achieved through agile Kanban boards and daily stand-ups but the transparency achieved through this approach basically only helps the people who stand in front of the board. If no further reporting is constructed Kanban boards do not bring the necessary transparency to managers, customers and stakeholders surrounding the core team.
The 10 Commandments of Project Control
In order to understand what the criteria for good project status reports are, I have developed the 10 Commandments of Project Control. This app is based on these 10 Commandments. With an app I hope to contribute to the research in this field beyond an academic research paper. In order to stand its test in reality, I have tried to make THE PROJECT STATUS app as convenient to use as possible.
Academics, researchers and practitioners are invited to use THE PROJECT STATUS, try it out and give feedback. Thank you.
You will find the app here: https://project-status.org
The app also implements a lot of significant research results in the area of project management:
- Project status travel
- Project context
- Involved people list
- Vertical KANBAN
- Number based project development graphs
- Maturity score